The Birth Of A Nation: James Baldwin On Nat Turner’s Slave Revolt (audio)

The most famous telling of the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion so far has been William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a book that hobbled Styron with the uproar it caused. (It also won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1968.) Styron was a white man from Virginia, and black leaders denounced him for his gall in undertaking to speak in Turner’s voice. One exception was Styron’s friend, the great author and civil rights figure James Baldwin. Baldwin said that Styron had “begun to write a common history — ours.”